The latest project of the Rebel Babel Ensemble is a universal tribute to hip hop pioneer DJ Premier. The transcultural international big band, perhaps the world’s largest (currently boasting over 11,000 members from sixteen countries), unleashed “Tribute to DJ Premier,” its herculean video “gift” to Preemo and the world, on the legend’s birthday, March 21, 2020. For this particular orchestration and video project, Rebel Babel and its conductor and co-founder Łukasz “L.U.C.” Rostkowski arranged samples from DJ Premier’s work for a jazz big band collaboration that was recorded in eight European and U.S. cities with just under 100 musicians involved. Read the rest of this entry »

Wajatta—the musical duo of Reggie Watts and John Tejada—kicks off the Natural History Museum’s season opener of its popularFirst Fridays series on Friday, March 6, 2020 with a performance celebrating the release of the duo’s sophomore album, Don’t Let Get You Down. Wajatta and a host of other performers and lecturers, including Ologies podcast host Alie Ward and KCRW’s Novena Carmel, will appear at the “after-hours” event that runs from 5:00 to 10:00pm.

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Wajatta — the musical duo of Reggie Watts and John Tejada — return with their second album, Don’t Let Get You Down, due out on the groundbreaking Brainfeeder label on February 28, 2020. Coming from different worlds, but sharing a passion for the rich history of electronic music, beat-boxer/comedian/musician Watts and electronic music artist/DJ/producer Tejada brings out the best in each other’s formidable skill sets. Where the duo’s debut album, Casual High Technology, hinted at the broad stylistic possibilities inherent in the marriage of Watts’ elastic, soul-stirring vocals and Tejada’s layered, melodically inventive productions, Don’t Let Get You Down makes good on that promise.

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Electronic music-based nonprofit Give a Beat, DJ Times magazine and DanceGruv Radio have partnered for a new radio series called Prose of a Con featuring the poetry and prose of Russell Wardlow, a resident at Omaha Correctional Center. The six-part series will run bi-weekly from Sunday, October 13 through Sunday, December 22, 2019, at 5:00 pm EST on DanceGruv Radio with each episode showcasing Wardlow’s prose and poetry read aloud by DJs across the electronic music community. Wardlow composes his work entirely behind bars. His poignant and insightful readings speak to the healing power of artistic expression to help transcend the harsh reality of the prison system.

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Electronic music-based nonprofit Give a Beat launched the Prison Electronic Music Program in two California correctional facilities in July 2019 as part of a contract awarded by California Arts Council’s Arts in Corrections (AIC) program. The goal of Give a Beat’s year-long program—which focuses on the fundamentals of DJing and beat production—is to help students develop their own sound expressions and technical acumen while also learning business development and music history. It is designed to help students return to the workforce with valuable technical, social, and entrepreneurial skills. Led by passionate DJs and music producers, currently the course is being taught at California City Correctional Facility (CAC) and Kern Valley State Prison (KVSP). This first Prison Electronic Music Program will run through June 2020. It is Give a Beat’s most expansive and long-term music production offering/course to date.

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Wajatta in November 2019
Extended Biography

When beat-boxer/comedian/musician Reggie Watts and electronic music artist/DJ/producer John Tejada first joined forces as Wajatta, the results were hailed as “a surprising and winning new collaboration” (NPR) and “in league with Frankie Knuckles and Jamie Principle’s classic house” (Los Angeles Times). Coming from different worlds, but sharing a passion for the rich history of electronic dance music, Watts and Tejada bring out the best in each other’s formidable skill sets. It’s a cosmic collision of funk-infused techno and soul-steeped vocal acrobatics, equaling and at times surpassing the brilliance of their solo work.

Wajatta (a mashup of the artists’ last names, pronounced wa-HA-ta) began in the most fitting of places: an underground warehouse party in 2016, where John was playing a late-night DJ set and Reggie, a long-time fan of John’s propulsive techno productions, was in the audience. From there a friendship blossomed, formed over strong coffee, similar backgrounds (John was born in Austria and raised in Los Angeles; Reggie moved at a young age from Germany to Montana and later Seattle) and similar interests: ‘80s sci-fi films, old-school hip-hop.

When they began making music together, the chemistry was immediate. In their very first session at John’s home studio in Los Angeles, they completed three tracks. “It was pretty instantaneous,” Reggie agrees. “What he played me was really fun and sparked a lot of possibilities in my head.”

Their initial collaborations resulted in the acclaimed 2018 debut album, Casual High Technology, that seamlessly married Reggie’s mix of beat-boxing, scat-singing and multi-octave, R&B-inspired crooning with John’s nimble, harmonically rich forays into house, techno, hip-hop and beyond. Since that release, the two friends have squeezed more recording sessions into their demanding schedules, continuing to find new inspiration in one another’s talents. 

The best of those sessions are now part of a second full-length, Don’t Let Get You Down, due for release on Brainfeeder on February 28, 2020. As thrilling as Casual High Technology was, Don’t Let Get You Down is a major leap forward, a reflection of the way John and Reggie’s partnership has grown deeper and more intuitive.

They build most tracks from scratch, bouncing ideas off one another from initial spark to finished product. It’s all done in person: “We never just share files,” John notes. They also try to keep their sessions as spontaneous as possible, in a neverending quest to, as Reggie puts it, “capture the freshness.” As a result, Don’t Let Get You Down’s 11 tracks crackle with the energy of fresh ideas captured at the moment of inspiration. It’s electronic music made organically, from two masters at the top of their respective games.

That organic approach extends to their live shows, at which Tejada rebuilds the duo’s tracks on his samplers and synths, while the multi-octave Watts conjures vocal symphonies out of little more than a loop station and a delay pedal. Besides a number of concerts in Los Angeles, they’ve performed a handful of shows around the U.S. — San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, Taos — as well as high-profile events and festivals such as Movement in Detroit, MUTEK in Montreal, CRSSD Festival in San Diego, two Dirtybird shows (BBQ in 2018 and Campout in 2019), and a live studio session for KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic.

On Don’t Let Get You Down’s final track, “All I Need Is You,” listeners can get a taste of one of Wajatta’s most unique concerts. The fully improvised song was part of a spontaneously created 90-minute performance for Club Something at The Sweat Spot, an L.A. dance studio run by choreographer Ryan Heffington (Sia, Spike Jonze, FKA Twigs). It’s a six-minute snapshot of the improvisational brilliance that lies at the heart of everything Wajatta does — an approach summed up in Reggie’s off-the-cuff one-liner near the track’s end: “We’re making everything here for you from scratch — just to ensure maximum freshness.”

Watts can currently be seen nightly as the bandleader for CBS’s The Late Late Show With James Corden. He first burst into the American audience’s lives as the co-host of IFC’s groundbreaking variety series Comedy Bang! Bang! Over his 15-year career as a solo performer, he’s honed a unique style that blurs the lines between music and comedy, as is evident in his 9-minute TED Talk in 2012, as well as multiple comedy specials for both Comedy Central and Netflix, and at the invitation of Jack White, the record Reggie Watts Live at Third Man Records. Everything he does is 100% improvised — most notably, the multi-layered music tracks he builds on the fly, looping his beat-boxed rhythms and soulful vocals into spontaneous musical inventions that are funky, hypnotic and often hilarious. See updates at https://www.instagram.com/reggiewatts.

In Wajatta, Reggie infuses those same techniques into John’s sinuous sounds, creating a refreshingly playful take on electronic music — one in which it’s often hard to separate the machines from the human voice. “There’s a lot of stuff happening that you may not realize is Reggie,” John explains. Though he’s a big fan of Reggie’s uncanny beat-boxing skills, John prefers to disguise those effects among the pulses and patters of his analog synths and vintage drum machines. “It’s cool for it to be like, ‘I didn’t know that was his voice.’”

John, for his part, has been at the vanguard of West Coast techno since 1994, releasing a succession of acclaimed albums, singles and EPs for such prestigious labels as Kompakt, Poker Flat, Cocoon, Plug Research and his own long-running imprint, Palette Recordings. Among his best-known tracks are the moody, mesmeric “Farther and Fainter” (from his 2011 Kompakt full-length Parabolas) and the 2005 underground banger, “Sweat (On the Walls)” — now a staple of Wajatta’s high-energy live shows, where Reggie delivers witty, freestyle riffs on the track’s original spoken-word vocals. See updates at https://www.instagram.com/johntejadaofficial.

With influences ranging from Detroit techno to Chicago house, Marvin Gaye to Mantronix, Wajatta’s sound is both familiar and wholly original — and, like all great dance music, ultimately life-affirming, as Reggie vocalizes, sometimes without words, the joyful energy of his and John’s funky, shape-shifting productions. “That’s the great thing about working with John,” Reggie says with an infectious grin. “He’s so steeped in the history of this music. I just pick up on that and run with it.”

Green Galactic’s 25 Year Anniversary Celebration
Thu. June 21

1720 / 1720 E. 16th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90021  / 8:00pm – 1:00am / free / all ages Read the rest of this entry »

Green Galactic is pleased to announce the release of Los Angeles-based electronic musician Morgan Hendry’s latest project, Longcove, on March 30, 2018. The 30-minute album, which was composed as one continuous piece, was created entirely out of sounds found around a small inlet in Chamberlain, Maine called Long Cove where Hendry’s family has multigenerational roots. What was originally intended as a reflection on time and memory became a call to arms after the United States pulled out of the Paris Agreement in June 2017. Following a decade as the drummer/keyboardist for the acclaimed instrumental rock band Beware of Safety, Hendry has been releasing music under his own name for several years, including live outdoor modular synthesizer performances and experimental pieces drawing from his technical background in Astronautical Engineering. Once released, Longcove will be available digitally through http://morganhendry.bandcamp.com, iTunes, and other online outlets. 

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The latest missive from Acid Test has the label identifying with its hometown, Los Angeles, more than ever. LA-born Vienna resident and label mainstay Tin Man takes Vienna-born Angeleno resident John Tejada along for a four-track journey which dwells on the activity which defines life in the City of Angels: Driving. Opener “Swiftbox” is a perfect amalgam of Auvinen and Tejada’s respective styles— Tremulous 303 and complex minor key melodicism and deconstructed stabs. “Diamond Lanes” is another muscular acid cut with a subtle, swinging percussion. The Diamond Lanes in question can be used when you have a passenger in the car. Read the rest of this entry »

Arts organization Create:Fixate (C:F) presents Branching Out on Saturday, November 7, 2015. C:F will also be branching out into a new location, holding this installment of the highly anticipated ongoing event series at Werkartz, a new multidisciplinary arts complex in LA’s Chinatown. For over a decade, C:F has established its unique signature blend of presenting vibrant visual art and music in an immersive cultural experience. These one-night-only events feature top emerging talent from around the globe, with an emphasis on the local talent of Los Angeles. Find Your Grind Foundation is a major supporter of the event. The excitement begins at 4:00pm with a three-hour gallery preview. The main event starts at 7:00pm and closes at 1:30am. Read the rest of this entry »